“The other tunnel”—Jared pointed to the other side of the room—“heads right back toward the lake and the floating city. We don’t want to go that way, so that tunnel is now off limits altogether. The other tunnel might lead somewhere if we can dig through. I’ll need everyone’s help to get this done.”
Jared passed out the shovels to the group. Unfortunately, they only had a few, but it would allow them to work in shifts so they had fresh bodies on the task. He wracked his brain trying to remember if they had any pickaxes they could use for taking out the rock. A mental inventory appeared in his mind of the closet where they kept the tools and he found a few of them leaning against the back wall.
“I’ll go grab more tools and anyone left up in their rooms. I want all hands on deck for this. It’s going to be grueling work, but the sooner we have a viable escape from the area, the better. If you break through to the other side and I’m not here, please do not explore without me. If you have a gun, step forward and guard the entrance until I’ve returned.”
After he’d gathered everyone, he staged them at the base of the cliff and sent them one at a time down into the tunnel, making sure they took the same route he had for minimal visibility of anything above.
Finally, everyone finished the trek and Jared followed. Passing out the pickaxes, Jared kept one for himself. Those already working had made very little progress. They’d dug a little out from under the rock blocking their way, but it only served to increase the width of the stream. If they couldn’t break down the rock, or if they found nothing beyond, then digging down was also an option. The water had to go somewhere, after all.
“All right, everyone gather round.” Jared waited until every last person surrounded him, Scarlet and her brothers included.
“I’ll take the first crack at bringing down that rock blocking the path. While I’m working in there, I want everyone to stay out here. If the wall comes down, I’ll launch myself out of the way. We’ll need to haul the debris away, but thankfully we only need to get it to the entrance and Scarlet and her family can handle the rest. When I need to take a break, only two others should be in the room at a time. One with a shovel and the other with a pickaxe. Everyone understand?”
Heads nodded in agreement. Satisfied, he gripped the digging tool tighter and walked to the wall. His enhanced strength should allow him to make better progress than any of the others, but then he’d never used a tool like this to dig rocks. He’d seen others use them growing up, but he’d never had a reason to join them since he’d had a different job assignment. Shrugging, Jared took up a stance just to the side and swung it like a baseball bat.
The metal head clanged off the rock and a shower of sparks briefly lit the space. The head of the pickaxe rebounded so forcefully, he had to step back to avoid getting hit by the other side.
Okay, power swings are not a good idea.
Jared repositioned himself in front of the rock wall, but this time he tried an overhead swing. Again, the head of the pickaxe clanged off the wall, only this time, it continued straight down to the ground, making him lose his balance and topple toward the wall. He caught himself at the last minute, but he’d almost smashed his head. Embarrassed, Jared glanced back to see everyone looking at him.
“You will figure it out.” From her tone, Scarlet was clearly enjoying the show.
“Thanks,” Jared replied dryly. “It’s not as easy as it seems.”
It didn’t look like any of the other colonists thought it was funny. They watched with interest as he tried in vain to attack the wall. Shaking his head, Jared set himself again. He tried a cross between a baseball swing and overhead chop this time. Just before he swung down, he noticed a small section of the wall angled out and up. He twisted the axe handle at the last second to align the pick directly at the angled section.
The pickaxe crashed home, sending a resounding crack through the small room. A huge split ran from the impact point, running horizontal to the ground and extending across a four-foot section. He needed to brace his feet to get the pickaxe out of the wedge he’d created. As he worked it out, Jared used his body weight to lever the head of the tool back and forth. Another pop from the rock cracked through the room and the thin line expanded. It wasn’t enough to bring it down yet, but a few more hits might do the trick.
The axe freed, Jared took up his stance once more, swinging with everything he had. It was hard to say, but it was possible Maximum Muscle activated for a short burst. Regardless, the axe head flew forward blindingly fast and scored a direct hit on the same spot he’d hit before. The rock split, sending an ear-piercing clap through the room.
The impact sent vibrations up and down his arms, and he lost his grip on the handle. It was probably a good thing as the section of wall fell. He dove backward as a massive segment of rock crashed to the ground where he’d stood only a moment earlier.
Already dark in the room, it was hard to see anything on account of the dust and debris in the air. However, a blast of stale, musty air indicated he’d broken through to the other side. Flipping to Heat Sight, Jared waited to see if any creatures moved on the other side. The noise was enough to alert anything for miles down the tunnel. No thermal signatures showed up, but a faint scratching sound started up on the other side of the now removed barrier.
“Heads up everyone, something is moving on the other side. Get back and make room for Scarlet at the entrance. I want her ready if she needs to back me up.”
Jared made sure everyone stood back and took up a position in front of the tunnel, his phase pistols held at the ready. Still, nothing showed on Heat Sight, but the sound grew louder. Hundreds, if not thousands, of light tapping noises bounced around the chamber walls.
Shaking his head, Jared still couldn’t see any warm bodies coming their way, but it sounded like they were right on top of them. He switched back to night vision, and his blood curdled.
A swarm of ebony-colored arachnids billowed out of the opening he’d made. Brilliant white hour glasses burned on their bulbous bodies. If they’d had a light source, Jared would likely find the hour glasses were actually red, indicating these were black widows the size of small dogs.
“Spiders!” Jared screamed.
His scream might have been a few octaves too high, but he didn’t care, and it warned everyone else what was coming. He hated spiders more than any other creature or insect on the planet. Only centipedes and millipedes came in a close second next to these things. Seeing a horde of them surging at him like this was paralyzing.
“Jared, snap out of it.”
Scarlet’s words were like a splash of cold water on his face, and he shook off his paralysis, pumping phase rounds into the throng of black, bulbous bodies. It looked like there might have been other types of spiders too, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the glowing hour glasses. If doom had a symbol, Jared imagined it looked similar to the design on their bodies.
His phase rounds created swathes of scorched limbs and bodies through the mass, but it barely made a dent. There were too many. Squeezing the triggers as fast as he could, the rays of death destroyed everything coming at him. It was all he could do to take out those in the front and keep them from gaining ground. It was only a matter of time before they’d get past the phase rounds and continue forward. Jared realized he was wasting precious rounds and stepped back from opening.
“Scarlet?”
She stepped forward and drew in a lungful of air.
“Hold up,” Jared said, holding up his hand. “Let’s wait until they get closer. It would be nice if you can take out the whole group all at once. If they escape back into the tunnel, it means we’ll just need to take them out later. I do not want to face these things in their own lair.”
Jared’s face was white as a sheet, and his hands shook as he watched hundreds of the spiders racing forward. It took every last ounce of his willpower to keep from sending more ph
ase energy down the tunnel. When it seemed like the spiders would make it past the opening, Scarlet let loose a roar so great, everyone had to shield their ears.
Bright violet flames ripped through the air and into the tunnel filled with spiders. Jared heard sizzling flesh, but thankfully, it wasn’t the same sickening pops he’d heard with the lizards and rats. As he watched, the spiders shriveled up and died, going belly up on the ground.
Scarlet’s flames scorched everything in the tunnel for a full minute before she stepped back, her sides heaving from the exertion. To be on the safe side, Jared asked her to make room for one of her brothers in case they needed a second round of dragon fire.
The smell of the roasting spiders wasn’t actually that bad, but it sent wafts of smoke curling upward. He hoped it wasn’t enough to escape above the cavern into the open air, but there was nothing they could do about it. He’d worry about that later if it caused an issue. For now, he wanted to make sure they’d destroyed all the spiders and the only way to do that was to go through the mass of dead bodies to the other side.
Just before he walked through, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
“Kitty? Can you go see if the spiders are dead?”
The big cat padded up to him and looked at him through narrowed eyes.
“Hey, you have camouflage. Just activate before going through, and they won’t see you right?”
“It will not work on these spiders. They can see in multiple spectrums at once and sense vibrations.”
“Oh…I didn’t—”
“I will still investigate.” She lifted her head and stalked forward, clearly flaunting her bravado for all to see.
Jared shook his head and laughed. He didn’t care in the least if it made him seem like a coward. He hated spiders. There was nothing else to discuss on the matter. If Kitty could make sure they were all dead, then so be it.
Once Kitty disappeared beyond the entrance, Jared switched to telepathy.
“Let me know if you need help.”
“I will be fine.”
His ability to use telepathy at a distance with anyone really helped. He couldn’t do it with Attis yet because the bird still had a primitive mind and needed a lot of enhancements. Kitty had had nearly a decade to develop the capability to speak with Elle. So, while it wasn’t as strong as one of the water folk’s telepathy, it was enough for Jared to hear her from short distances.
“Jared, you must see this.”
“Coming.”
Well, he’d get there, eventually. He paused at the start of the charred bodies, dreading walking through the sea of curled up arachnids. Resigned to his fate, Jared sucked in a breath and walked into the room. The shriveled bodies crunched underfoot, causing ash to billow around his footfalls. The only saving grace was the complete absence of smell. For whatever reason, the spiders didn’t have an odor. If they did, it was so faint it didn’t bother him. The cave itself already smelled musty with the water running through it. Even now, the clouds of ash drifted into the water and disappeared downstream. It was a good thing this massacre happened downstream so they still had ready access to fresh drinking water. At least he hoped it was fresh with the rats upstream, but they didn’t have time to investigate that anymore.
The fragments of the spiders might not be deadly to consume, but there’s no way he’d even wash his clothes in it if he knew there were spider parts all over the place. He’d almost made it to the newly opened passage when a lone, spindly-legged terror dropped from the ceiling on a strand of web as thick as twine directly in front of Jared. He screeched a high-pitched cry and jerked backward. The spider might as well have been dead, as half its body was burned away, but it didn’t matter to Jared. His irrational fear of spiders got the better of him and his uncontrolled reaction sent him careening backward to land in a pile of the fried critters.
The ensuing cloud of ash enveloped Jared as he involuntarily sucked in lungsful of the spider remnants. Hacking, Jared launched himself to his feet and doubled over, heaving as his insides performed somersaults. He vomited anything he’d eaten in the last day, and still the ash clung to the inside of his mouth and nose. He couldn’t get it out no matter how many times he tried.
Frantic, Jared retreated to the main cavern and plunged his head into the stream, sucking in a mouthful of (hopefully) fresh water. Greedily, Jared drank his fill before standing back up. Vanessa was right by his side and looked like she wanted to comfort him, but kept her distance. Jared looked down at himself and realized that spider parts and ash covered him from head to toe. The only clean portion of his body was his head he’d just dunked under. With no decorum, he dropped the rest of his gear and weapons on the side of the stream and plunged his whole body in, clothes and all. He’d rather have sopping wet clothes than be covered in the nasty bits and pieces.
Satisfied he’d rid his body of as much ichor as possible, Jared reattached his gear and weapons and strode back into the room. The spider that’d given him the near heart-attack was still hanging in place, its remaining limbs opening and closing in death throes. Pulling his phase pistol, Jared squeezed off a round. He watched in satisfaction as the spider disintegrated entirely, leavening nothing but the strand of web hanging from the ceiling.
Jared reached up to touch the strand, curious about its strength and stickiness, but even his curiosity couldn’t overcome his fear, and he sidestepped the webbing. Finally, in the clear, Jared ducked through the opening where Kitty waited, only to draw up short, his jaw dropping in shock.
Not a single wall was visible through the dense layers of webbing covering the area. The only cleared portion was around the entrance where Scarlet’s flames greedily consumed the webs.
“Did you see any more spiders?”
“No.”
The single clipped response didn’t do much to assuage his fears, so Jared clarified. “How far did you go?”
“Not far.”
Annoyed, Jared knew this line of questioning wouldn’t work. He looked at Kitty in frustration and swore he saw a smug expression on the cat’s face. Narrowing his eyes, he glared at the overgrown pile of fur.
“Kitty.”
“I went to the center of this room and discovered nothing. No more spiders, at least.”
“Thank you,” Jared managed through clenched teeth. Now everyone knew his aversion to the arachnoid family and would no doubt lord it over him for a while. He didn’t care. Spiders were nasty things, and whoever created them had a terrible sense of humor.
“I really wish we had a torch right about now. Actually…”
Jared ran back to the other room and asked around until he found a couple extra flashlights. They weren’t that strong, but with his night vision they didn’t need to be. A little extra light in the room would do wonders to enhance the ambient light and thus his night vision. He set one flashlight near the entrance and walked the other out to the center of the space.
He paused there for a long moment, straining his eyes and ears for any movement at all. If there were other spiders in the area, they weren’t moving. After the ruckus they’d made earlier, it should’ve awakened them by now. Still, caution was the way to go here. While he didn’t think any of the spiders could kill him given his nanite defenses, if he somehow got covered in spiders, he might just have a heart attack and die anyway.
Satisfied there was nothing about to leap out to get him, he walked back to the entrance and started along the wall to his right. It was near impossible to figure out how big the cavern was with all the webs, so he went back and grabbed the pickaxe to see if he could tear them down.
Slowly, the wall came into view, and a sight that would haunt Jared for the rest of his life revealed itself. Row after row of bodies hung suspended along the perimeter of the wall. There was no rhyme nor reason to the the macabre display of creature and humanoid bodies decorating the walls. He saw all kind
s of rodents, reptiles, mammals, and human corpses splayed out. Every single body was just a husk, all the blood drained, their eyes and any soft parts of their flesh gone. Their flesh was pale gray from the blood loss. It reminded Jared of mummies. He’d never seen one in person, but his textbooks showed ancient Egyptian mummies drained of blood before being wrapped in linen bandages and placed in a sarcophagus. This entire chamber was one giant tomb.
It wasn’t even as though they were all old. Many of the bodies were still wet as if drained recently. Pools of blood, both fresh and dried, covered the entire floor, extending out several feet from the walls. The bodies had large cavities carved out of their torsos and piles of spider eggs lay inside.
Jared’s skin tingled, his heart fluttering with anxiety. Nothing could have prepared him for this sight. It was worse, so much worse than the rats’ lair where he’d nearly died. Not even the maggots ripping into his flesh had sickened his as much. His mind wandered to the humans decorating the walls in the cave.
It was impossible to say where they’d come from, but a part of him idly wondered if they’d lived in the rooms above. However, he quickly dismissed that idea since they’d found no evidence someone lived there before. At least, not in recent past. Jared peered into the darkness beyond and wondered if there were more tunnels down the path and that’s where these people had come from.
The closer Jared scrutinized the bodies, the more horrific the scene became. From the patterns of the webs around the body, it indicated the cadavers weren’t always inanimate on the wall. And if they’d been alive when strung up, it meant they’d had to watch the scene around them as they slowly bled out, feeding the hordes of spiders. Then, they’d watched as the spiders lay clusters of eggs inside those who had died.
An uncontrollable shudder wracked his body, and Jared had to leave the room. He couldn’t stomach it. Utterly repulsed by the display, he lost control of his mental and emotional barriers, prompting Scarlet to reach out.
Radioactive Revolution: A Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic Adventure Page 19